White Bird in a Blizzard [Hardcover]

Laura Kasischke (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1999

Laura Kasischke's first novel, SUSPICIOUS RIVER, was hailed as "extremely powerful" (The Los Angeles Times) and "amazing...beautifully written" (The Boston Globe). Now Kasischke follows up her auspicious debut with mesmerizing story of youthful passion and loss of innocence.

When Katrina Connors' mother walks out on her family, Kat is surprised but not shocked; the whole year she has been "becoming sixteen" - falling in love with the boy next door, shedding her babyfat, discovering sex - her mother has been slowly withdrawing. As Kat and her impassive father pick up the pieces of their daily lives, she finds herself curiously unaffected by her mother's absence. But in dreams that become too real to ignore, she's haunted by her mother's cries for help. Finally, she must act on her instinct that something violent and evil has occurred - a realization that brings Kat to a chilling discovery.

Like SUSPICIOUS RIVER, which The New Yorker described as "by turns terrifying and ravishingly lyrical," WHITE BIRD BLIZZARD evokes works of Kathryn Harrison and Joyce Carol Oates - and confirms Kasischke's arrival as a major literary talent.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Four crucial years in a troubled teenager's life are the focus of this eloquently written, suspenseful second novel by the author of the praised Suspicious River. Having grown up in an extraordinarily suffocating atmosphere, 16-year-old Kat Connors greets her mother's disappearance one winter day with stoic calm. Kat is overweight, lives in a cookie-cutter suburb, feels her heavy figure makes her a social outcast?and yet has a pivotal adolescent sexual experience. Readers who find similarities between Kat and Delores Price, the heroine of Wally Lamb's She's Come Undone, will also see eerie similarities in Kat's tense relationship with her mother (both mothers have birds as pets, in one case a parakeet, in the other a canary; the girls' fathers hate them; subsequently, both birds are found dead at the bottom of their cages). In both novels, mother and daughter end up sleeping with the same man without the daughter's knowledge. Like Delores, Kat sees a psychiatrist who becomes a father figure to her. Both heroines lose weight and triumph over their traumatic experiences, and each experiences the unexpected death of her mother. Despite these similarities, Kasischke's heroine is a fully rounded, distinctively portrayed character?a self-centered, typically hormone-crazed teenager who painstakingly develops into a self-aware young woman. Kasischke movingly charts her progress into a person, a young lady who learns to trust her instincts and her misgivings about the truth behind her mother's disappearance.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

At the start of Kasischke's second novel (after Suspicious River, Houghton, 1996), 16-year-old Katrina Connor is struggling to come of age in suburban Ohio. Preoccupied with sex and dating and eager to separate from parents she sees as terminally boring, she largely ignores her mother's efforts to lure her into closeness. Then, on a frigid January day, her mother vanishes. Sure, she had often complained about the dullness of marriage. But don't all full-time homemakers long for more, Katrina wonders? Why would she simply take off, without a trace? As the truth of Evie Connor's disappearance emerges, the reader is treated to a cacophony of raw teenage emotion. Shadowy dreams in which a beguiling Evie appears to Katrina enhance Kasischke's mysterious but always poetic prose. The soft, almost ethereal language makes the horrifying reality at the core of the book shockingly powerful, the hidden underside of a quintessentially normal domestic tableau. Highly recommended.?Eleanor J. Bader, Brooklyn NY
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 226 pages
• Publisher: Hyperion Books; 1st edition (January 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0786863668
• ISBN-13: 978-0786863662
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #652,026 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Laura Kasischke teaches in the University of Michigan MFA program and the Residential College. She has published seven collections of poetry and seven novels. She lives with her family in Chelsea, Michigan.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Life into art, June 20, 2002

By 

Susan H. Balduf "H-B" (Michigan) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: White Bird in a Blizzard (Hardcover)

Laura Kasischke has transformed a real-life crime, grisly and comical, into a meditation on cruelty. All of her characters have sharp edges; they crash against each other like ice floes. Kat's mother, the vanishing Eve, is so vicious to her daughter, it's a relief that she makes her odd exit. But there is no such thing as one abusive parent. There is always the attacker and the accomplice, the one who fails to defend the child. Which, in the end, is crueler? Kasischke's language is alarmingly vivid -- the bloody cupids are a particularly striking image -- and her pace has the drowsiness of someone sliding into unconsciousness in a snowbank. "White Bird" is a strange and remarkable novel, highly recommended.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The book was exquisitely poetic and suspenseful., August 6, 1999

By 

[e-mail] (Denver) - See all my reviews

This review is from: White Bird in a Blizzard (Hardcover)

Kasischke is a remarkable talent. Her book was beautiful simply for the poetry. It was also touchingly emotionally evocative. I was so sorry to finish it I had to find out what else Kasischke had written so I could get more. I hope she reads this. I teach creative writing at the University of Colorado at Denver and wish I could write as well as this woman.

4.0 out of 5 stars A chilling and poetic, ultimately insubstantial, mystery, September 4, 1999

By 

Andrea Hood: [e-mail] (Oakland, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: White Bird in a Blizzard (Hardcover)

Laura Kasischke's White Bird in a Blizzard startles and intrigues with its powerful images of suburban anomie and teenage lust and confusion. Kat Connors is a sharply drawn sixteen-year-old at the beginning of the book, intensely preoccupied by her newly sexual self. Her lovely, dissatisfied mother has just disappeared, abandoning Kat and her dim, unambitious father. Kat's memories of her mother weave into her dreams; the chill blank white of the January day her mother vanished become both the blankness of Evie Connors' life and an image of her disappearance -- she has become white on white and faded into insubstantiality. Kat tells her story through four successive Januaries. Each year Kat -- and the reader -- discover more about Evie, more about Kat's relationship with Phil, her sexy boyfriend next door, and about Kat's opaque father. Throughout, dreams of ice, feathers and smothering cold disturb Kat. The power of these images and the sense of mystery lure the reader through a story which becomes unfocused as Kat grows older. Her quaint grandmothers arrive and comment on Evie and abandonment. Kat seduces the hyper-virile detective who investigates her mother's disappearance. Phil becomes inexplicably distant, yet continues to identify himself as Kat's boyfriend. He behaves with a kind of sensibility at odds with his established personality as a thoughtless, proudly ignorant, over-sexed high school boy. Kat drifts through the years, occasionally prodded into deeper thought by her therapist. At last the detective, hearing about Kat's dreams, provides Kat the clue to understanding Evie Connors' disappearance. The language of Kat's final discovery is striking, though the revelation has been set up rather obviously. I enjoyed White Bird for its images of loss and bleakness, and for its depiction of a girl surging into her sexuality, but Evie Connors' entrapment in suburban hell seemed rather dated both for when the book was written and for the date it is set (late 80's). The characters, with the exception of Kat, feel prodded into place, rather than growing inevitably into themselves. A beautiful thin book that I would recommend for its lovely evocative language and dreamy tone -- and for lusty, confused Kat -- in spite of its weaknesses of plot and characterization.